Monday, August 31

Some records still remind me strongly of childhood, which
wasn’t a picture perfect one but not one that I remember as unpleasant either.
I think few of us remember childhood as unpleasant because those mental defense
mechanisms kick in where the brain compartmentalizes experience as it happens,
so that the body can continue to move without becoming paralyzed by blinding
darkness emanating from inside.

I’ve recently (ever since vacation) been playing dominoes.
It was hard to piece together a full set because my youngest is a toy hoarder
freak who takes little bits of this and that and puts them in bags and then
stashes the bags. I think she may be part raccoon or some shit. But we had like
four sets of dominoes but they’re all missing pieces. One of them’s a really
nice thick vintage butterscotch set, but there’s two pieces missing forever it
seems. But I did piece together two of the other sets which were same
thickness/style into a full set (still need a pimp ass butterscotch set again
though, just because anything butterscotch you do for leisure is goodness for
the soul). But thinking on my youngest and her domino bullshit reminded me of
my memory of dominoes as a kid. I set them up on this little broken ass organ
thing I had in my room, which had been my dad’s chainsaw fixing shop (inside
the house) but became my bedroom when a baby sister was born. The dominoes were
set up along the organ’s top, and on the windowsill because the window on the
back porch was right there. We came home from shopping or some shit one time, I
can’t remember, but I went in and my dominoes were messed up. I went and told
my mom, who told my dad. They both looked, and freaked because it meant
somebody had broken in as the dominoes sort of worked as a line across the
window. Dad disappeared into another room, and then was like, “we got ripped
off.”

So yeah, some records strongly remind me of childhood, in
good ways, and we try to sit at the kitchen table and play dominoes more often
lately, which also is a good thing. Life is always gonna be fucked up,
regardless of where you start, regardless of where you go. It is human nature
to make life fucked up somehow. Thus it become imperative to try and find some
fuckin’ chill.

I haven’t written much about the specific songs
during this summer countdown of slowed down tracks, at least not in the
digitized cyborg version, mostly because there are programs scouring for these
things everywhere, just looking to send somebody a threatening email with vague
legal bullshit being mentioned without heart. This is a strange time to be
alive because we are more connected to things nowhere near us at all, and yet
completely disconnected to our immediate surroundings. And then again maybe
that’s normal now, and I’m a fucking idiot fool. Maybe that’s the new normal,
and to not want to mention specifically what I’m actually mentioning is
unnecessary obfuscation and I should just write the song titles on my dick and
take a picture and make that the post.

Do the Knowledge is one of many planted in my
brain by Rakim, who line for line had more depth than any MC ever. There is no
doubt our depth of language has been lost, and that’s not just old man talk,
that’s a byproduct of us being able to communicate quicker with more visual
imagery. The necessity of actual lengthy language is no longer as necessary. It’s
a strange regression, although that assumes that progress is more language,
which may not be true either. Perhaps the ultimate form of expression is to
just shoot single grunts at each other but be able to convey a depth of meaning
within that grunt.

But a part of doing the knowledge was breaking
things apart, digging out the meaning of the parts and what that all added up
to as a whole. The parts are smaller now, but it seems like the meaning within
those smaller parts might be a lot deeper than we realize, but we are only
accepting the superficial surface meaning. Or then again, maybe everybody else
is seeing the entire depth of meaning and I’m the lone idiot. I certainly feel
that way most days lately. Whatever though.

Saturday, August 29

To the north of here more immediately is a commercial
clusterfuck that’s been developing just over the county line, where the
Wal-Mart and Lowe’s and a weird diamond interchange that is confusing but not
really just because you are going the wrong side of the road as they want to get
people off the interstate quickly, even though not that much traffic is
happening there, yet. I guess that’s a sign of things to come if they’re
putting in housing sub-divisions and commercial complexes (more like
complicateds) and shit like that. Far north is DC where the cultural decisions
to move in directions like that are made for this nation I happened by chance
to be born inside of.

To the east more immediately is just roads to Richmond, all
of which I know in finding various paths to a nexus of my existence as an
adult. Sometimes I go interstate if in rush, other times I go back roads if I
want to vibe to the nothing much. Farther east is the Atlantic, where I need to
dip myself more often, baptizing the filth away, absolving my self of the sins
of being homo sapien as much as possible.

To the immediate south is Buckingham County, with a large
percentage of working aged men lacking jobs, unemployed or disabled or given
up, and it’s a sad place but people get by, somehow, probably in ways we all
shouldn’t be proud of. Further south is not really that much further because
that’s the gateway back to Southside Virginia, which is has had larger cultural
influence on me through my presence there than anywhere else on earth.
Southside Virginia is beautiful but also fucked, and being it’s not in the
mountains, it lacks the known fuckedness of the Appalachians. But it’s like
flat Appalachia basically, and I am simultaneously proud but embarrassed of it.
To the immediate west is the mountains, where I run off to
do reverse baptisms, kiss the clouds a little while and try to get mind right
through elevated state. This is a very necessary activity. Mountains and oceans
are the twin rechargers of human mentality (heart), and thus rivers are sort of
the conduit between the two, thus also fairly necessary. Further to the west is
the rest of America. It could be suggested I should have seen more of all that,
but at the same time it’s hard to fully experience even the tiny little region
you are already in, not to any deep level, and at this point in my life I think
I’m more dedicated to that depth of area’s knowledge than accumulating random
distant spaces like baseball cards.

Friday, August 28

Hustling to work this morning, got in front of a
rough-looking old Silverado pick-up with pieces about to fall off rumbling the same
direction as me. It got on my ass for a minute as I got up to speed, and I
could see multiple body silhouettes squeezed into the cab, steered by grizzled
looking don’t-give-a-fuck dude behind wheel. We all got hung up at a busy back
roads intersection stop sign, and rear viewing them, I saw the dude, with full
haggard goatee of a man carefully trying to bridge business and party worlds,
with what I assumed (because we are always making assumptions) was his wife at
the passenger window. Both had that bulbous pear shape of the American
underclasser fed a steady diet of corn syrupy shit lacking nutritional
sustenance, so you are always eating but never feeling fed, and often times
forced by circumstance to go for the most cost-efficient food, which tends to
skew towards unhealthy in the long-term. I mean, they’ve never fed
Sprague-Dawley lab rats Burger King dollar menus over long periods to see how
it turned out, nor do I think they ever will, because we can’t have the truth
as it’s not as “affordable” and profit-friendly.

There were two other lumps stuffed between this
pair in the Silverado’s cabin – a girl who looked to be early teens, sitting
beside the man. The girl had that gaunt ever-so-slightly weasel-like face of
people with hillbilly genetics, which blends so well into drug addiction and
hardship later in life. That facial structure fills court dockets across
America. And there was a boy too, probably about 8 or 9, slouched up against
the woman next to the passenger window. The boy was sleeping, dead tired
sleeping, as there was no stirring about at stop signs or when we all started
up on our little rat race hamster wheel pursuits again eventually. They were
all so ugly in conventional sense, in a progressive sense, but such a beautiful
sight in my Friday morning rear view mirror – simple little family tucked into
a shit model Silverado, rumbling off to their day’s affairs and responsibilities
placed on each of them by the society we all share, just barely.

The road into the small city all of us work at,
all of us from all the surrounding localities long ago flooded by hurricanes or
decimated by abandoned factories, all the little towns that dried up almost
completely except for maybe a single “country” store, or the little towns still
holding on despite half a century trends – we all work in this little small
city. The two-lane opened its promising legs up to four, with a median strip,
and there was a cop on motorcycle with radar technology stalking there, knowing
all of us rats racing into our responsibilities were all late because of the
bottleneck structure of this maze, and the two opening up to four allowed for
bursts of frustration to move vehicles faster towards nowhere, and he wanted to
be there to skim a little more ticketed profit off for the state.

The family in the Silverado took the right lane
and I took the left, and they roared past, pieces hanging off the truck, bed
literally full of trash bags that looked to be recycled beer cans, no tailgate
just a tie-down strapped across for looks mostly, flapping in the air. The man
at the steering wheel was peeking into his side view mirror, back at the cop,
same as me, all of us making sure we were okay for the moment. Cops don’t
respect that family’s type of beauty; they don’t respect my beauty. They only
see delinquency, very little beauty in this world.

The Silverado kept plowing straight ahead as I
veered left onto an interstate highway system that connects a lot of these
cities but very few of these people. We’re all the fucking same, all fighting
the same shit stream, trying to maintain our obligations while still staying
halfway happy. We’re all trying to keep the business and the party both
attended to, but it gets more and more difficult every fucking month. In that
difficulty, we look at each other and see how ugly other people are, bunch of
rats, weasel-looking assholes, the enemy. But that’s not the truth. We’re all
beautiful, all just moving along the only way we really have been taught how.
We haven’t engineered each other’s misery, not at all.

Got that dilapidated camper love style, hiding out with
extension cords running seventeen miles from your ex-mom’s house down back
roads through logging trails mostly so you can keep your stereo plugged in and
play them old Z.Z. Hill jams with exactly 36 tea candles lit up keeping it
bright. Then maybe something gets kicked loose along the strand, or somebody
unplugs it because let’s face it human beings are real dicks, and the lights go
out so the music stops, but you still got all those tea candles, and you’re
still in the dilapidated camper and everybody smelling like lavender oil, and
that’s all good while things are active. But eventually you’re gonna be laying
there on that weird plywood with mattress on top of stretch that also makes two
bench seats and has the table that folds out because of dilapidated camper
engineering, and you’re laying there thinking, “fuck man, my alarm’s not gonna
go off now” because of the extension cord being unplugged. Sure, cybertron people
got robot space phones with alarms that blast retro computer sounds at
melodious irony level so you wake up with snarky smile on your face. But
dilapidated camper motherfuckers like you ain’t got robot space phones – you’re
using a fucking burner like season three of The Wire, which is ancient history,
and in fact you still know where the three pay phones that are left are located
because sometimes you use the one by the truck stop on 15 South to call people,
not really because you need to since you actually do have your season three of
The Wire burner by Tracfone, but because it’s cool to get three dollars worth of
quarters and make some phone calls while people drive past and you smell fried
chicken from the E.W. Thomas, so fuck it.
But eventually the tea candles burn out, and you’re laying
there naked with another naked and you realize fuck getting up, fuck alarms,
fuck extension cords full of electricity, fuck all this other shit that gets in
the way of laying around naked. Not nearly enough laying around naked in our
so-called civilization.

Thursday, August 27

I get too bogged down in bullshit all too often
that I forget the entire beginning of this project, and what caused it – a jukebox
sitting in a field that got plugged into a red maple tree not far from my giant
pile of rocks that I’m going to buried under (somehow), which started emitting
music, albeit slowed down music, one night when I was sitting out there. I hadn’t
cut the field in a while, except for paths, hadn’t even chilled with the sunflowers,
or taken rock offerings down to the pile of quartz altar, and that’s when
everything seems to start to feel like too much. But I went down there last
night, and just sat on my favorite milk crate, hearing the animals and insects
of the night make their noises, looking up at a sweet moon floating over top a
vast planet far larger than we pretend it’s been reduced to. Like, there are
still so many corners (not really corners because they lack fences) to get lost
in, shadows to dwell inside of, so many places to be what you are supposed to
be. Why do make this assumption that everything is charted, everything is
tracked, that we are being controlled? Billions and billions of people can’t
all be controlled, it’s just not possible. The immensity of bureaucratic effort
needed to even try such a thing (which they are in fact trying) is so large
that even those within that bureaucracy would stop giving half a fuck, and even
while you are being watched, there’s a good chance you are being poorly watched.
It’s kind of like being afraid to shoplift – they might see you, but when you
actually do it you realize that they mostly don’t see you. Sure, if you keep
doing it, they’ll eventually see you, but you’re only going to get busted once
for something you do ten times.

But that’s the other side to it – they have rules
for everything, and they will selectively enforce them. All of us are illegal
at any given moment, or at least it can be made to be that way. It just depends
on whether they enforce their slew of legalities to the fullest extent or not.
But if any of us is noticeably stepping out of line in any way that riles up
the wrong bureaucratic feathers, they will put that shit in motion. Thus, dwell
in shadows. You start showing your ass, and somebody’s gonna want to correct
that ass. But you keep it discreet, no flaunting, you’d be surprised with what
you can get away with. And it might come crumbling in on you at some point, but
you have to expect devil ass world is gonna try to eventually oppress you. The
trick is to keep it light, both in how you do your dirtgod, but also in how
deeply you layer it. You can’t dig in your dirtgod activities as if it were
legit business enterprise, because the devils will come shine a light in your
shadows eventually and try to oppress. You’ve got to be able to move, weave,
adapt, survive. Because fuck these devil ass devils.

Wednesday, August 26

Many old songs of the patriarchal yet wild variety
tend to be of the basic subject matter, “Hey, you don’t seem to be completely
happy, so come here and let me fuck you happy.” I can feel that sentiment. Life
has become mundane and somewhat meaningless. I feel disconnected to most
organic aspects of my environment, and am distracted by the inorganic
techno-vices that seem planted like land mines throughout my daily path. Shit is
out of balance, but the world spins upon crooked axis so it pretends everything’s
upright and kosher. I am not completely happy, so I need the universe to just look
at my sexy dirtgod raven mackness, and fuck me good. And I don’t mean the
negative “fuck” as in everything went bad. I mean a good solid sweaty fucking
by the universe that pushes the dopamine and serotonin into a cocktail with the
adrenaline, and everything is excited sunshine and rainbows and river water
baptisms (but secular) all day long. If the universe is a doctor, it is what
the universe should order up, if it could. So even though the digital realm
seems (to me) like inorganic devilry full of the aforementioned techno-vices, I’m
putting that out there with intent, as non-denominational prayer, as a dirtgod
prayer, to hopefully be answered. In fact, fuck it, let’s just make it the
Dirtgod Prayer:

OH GIANT IMMENSE UNIVERSE, I AM JUST A HUMBLE DROP
OF YOUR ENDLESS ESSENCE, BUT THIS HUMBLE DROP IS FEELING POISONED, FEELING
POLLUTED, FEELING CLOUDY. RE-MAGNETIZE ME WITH THAT UNIVERSAL ENERGY, FUCK ME
UP GOOD AGAIN, SO THAT I CAN REMEMBER THAT I AM, IN TRUE AND LIVING FACT, STILL
A DROP OF YOUR ENDLESS ESSENCE. BECAUSE I KNOW I AM, BUT RIGHT NOW, I DON’T “KNOW”
I AM. YA KNOW? THANKS, YOUR MAN DIRTGOD.

Tuesday, August 25

Where is everybody going? There are houses with no
sign of people all over, other than NO TRESPASSING or PRIVATE PROPERTY signs
posted because obviously derelict homes gonna get derelicted even more, always.
But where has everybody gone? On top of this, most cities I seem to go around
of various sizes have booming downtowns, at least in the sense of hammers
pounding and nail guns shooting and cranes and scaffolding and basic (but very
complicated) gentrificational rebirths happening. It’s a lot harder to get shot
in a lot of places you could’ve easily been shot ten or fifteen years ago. But
where have all those people gone that used to be there, that were mired in that
shit to where shooting or getting shot at was normalized behavior? I’m not
clear on where the human Americans have gone.

Through trick-nology algorithmic calculations, we
have less jobless than ever before (they say), but I honestly know very few
people happy about their work. There seems to be a pervasive frustration with
stagnant existence, which generally is a nice way of putting, “I’m not getting
anywhere in life, and in fact probably am sinking backwards, financially
speaking.”

But all these empty houses just sitting there,
with signs protecting their ownership against anyone actually using them
without given proper paperwork to personal property ownership system. That’s
some weird shit. I am more likely to be harassed by law enforcement if I’m
walking around some vacant property, publicly, even though no one is there and
I’m doing no harm to it, than if I were running some sort of financial scam on
a group of people, so long as it was a legally acceptable financial scam (like
home mortgages). Regardless of what devil ass math is used, America certainly
has no shortage of PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Legally, we love some private
property. No need to simultaneously mention the criminalization of being
homeless through vagrancy laws and ordinances, because those aware of such
things are aware of such things, and those who don’t care already don’t care.
But I’ve never understood, regardless of how callous a person may be, how you
could care about inanimate structures and unoccupied parcels of land more than
actual human beings. Even if those human beings made horrible decisions that
left them in dire circumstances, we should be more apt to rehabilitate people
than blocks of real estate. But we ain’t. Haters gonna hate, as well as
redevelop with hate in their heart, exiling the hated to god knows where. There
are some horrible suburban gulag ghetto tenements full of the exiled somewhere
that none of us pay attention to or the common public knows about. Oh wait,
that’s jail. Everybody’s in jail.

Monday, August 24

The notion of “you scratch my back, and I’ll
scratch your’s” is the 69 of more decent and public inter-personal
relationships. But it also speaks to a simpler philosophical outlook than might
be applied to our current overly-complicated world. Not having access to high
thread counts or scientifically mastered mattresses can make for aching backs
that lack the same smoothness. Harsher laundry detergents for the poors, as
well as cheaper second-hand clothes, not to mention tougher work environments
create a leathering of the skin – natural animal reaction to outer layer being
scuffed, scarred, tattooed, abused, stained, and minimally poisoned. Thus, the
more sheltered and protected and coddled back NEEDS less scratching, and yet
has more contact to actual back condition-altering scratching systems.
I was thinking on all this the past weekend, as I realized there’s a lot of
shit at my compound I need to fix. This is always the case. We do not have the
means to have other people fix shit, unless an absolute emergency, and even
then it has to be a special emergency. Mostly, fixing our broken shit requires
me figuring out how to fix our broken shit. I’d be the first to admit that my
knowledge of fixing all things is limited to what I’ve been forced to do, and I
am by no means an expert at fixing all things. Thus, a lot of what gets fixed
gets fixed in most likely haphazard less than stellar ways, just to keep
working.

Compounding this issue – as is the case for many
people – is we are not in the market of buying luxury items or top level home
appliances or vehicles or things like that. We get what we can afford, which
often is the bottom of the line model (home appliances) or some “deal” we come
across (vehicles). These things tend to break more often, thus more haphazard
fixing goes on. These things also are not built with stiff metals and strong
manufactured parts as they once were, because most companies that build such
things have worked unregulated for three decades at cutting costs wherever they
can, because that is how you build a successful business. A good cost-cutting
method is to use cheaper materials. Negative effect of this is shit breaks down
easier, but luckily the cost is cheaper too so often it’s just as affordable to
buy a new piece of shit than to fix the old piece of shit. Unless you are not
of that market. Then you fix your old piece of shit until your old piece of
shit is absolutely unfixable, which probably happens even faster being you are
the one who is forced to fix it, and then you figure out a way to juggle
obligations and credits to get a new piece of shit, only when absolutely
necessary. (Every small town and big city corner coin laundromat still exists
due to the fact the juggle sometimes does not allow for immediate replacement,
thus you end up spending even more to wash clothes even shittier at the coin
laundry. It is not easy being not comfortable.)

The good news is the over-consumption of inferior
material goods is not sustainable, and ultimately the entire thing will
collapse, either because we as a civilization can’t keep it up, or because the
very far down the comfortability scale start getting tired of this shit and
begin slitting throats further up the pyramid scam. They won’t reach the upper
levels, so unfortunately many people who are far below the power positions will
probably die, but they’ll look further up the pyramid to those at the bottom.
Hopefully, instead of being angry at those below, we can all share some
perspective at this entire nonsense scam, and those who are getting their
throats cut without actually being in power will look up further the pyramid
and start slitting the throats they can see. This will be trickle-up slit
throat-onomics, and it might actually effect actual change, where all our backs
start getting scratched. Because if all your needs are getting taken care of, without
thought, you have no idea how strong the itch can be.

I wrote a cycle of sonnets about exercises in
futility (probably multiple ones actually) and it seems even more relevant than
ever as I continue to pitter patter through these processes very much like
skipping pebbles into a creek in the middle of nowhere. The one difference
though is pebbles into the creek put you actually into the woods, hearing the
creek crinkle and trees rustle and shit like that, thus its not that futile.
This exercise in futility called this here lacks that. There are only blips and
bloops and redirects and refreshed loops.

I have a fairly hermetic personality, so I’ve
often thought about what is a human’s true social nature. Are we tribal
creatures, or are we fine all alone? Which is our preference? Through
half-a-lifetime of self-science, I can say I’m firmly of the belief we are a
tribal animal, and need that interaction, even when hermetic by our individual
nature. Our technocracy feels uncomfortable to me, on a larger level, because
this basic human necessity has been redirected (literally) through the
technology, and though I’m not going to suggest that type of connection is
fake, I will say it is not as deep and able to survive conflict. For example,
if there were power grid failure for two weeks and all the battery power was
gone from devices, those connections are gone, unless solidified in physical
life as well.
There are times where solitude no longer feeds me.
The problem is I mostly cultivate solitude, which reaps solitude. Being alone
does not accidentally reap a bunch of motherfuckers being around. So when the
solitude no longer feeds me, I have to go seek external sources of energy – not
battery power type energy but that real fucking life energy that makes it so
you wake up in the morning not wishing the day was already over. I can’t seem
to find it right now though. I can work on inputs and try to adjust whatever
factors internal chemistry might have in this process (and I’m so fucking
thankful I’m way more conscious of that shit now than I used to be), but it
doesn’t change the fact it seems harder to connect today. Even when connecting,
the redirect gets in the way, perhaps for you perhaps for the other person, and
true attentive connection is always just one window inside another person’s
mind with about twenty-five tabs open at all times. It’s a weird fucking time.
We may not realize it’s a dystopia until twenty years later. And most folks may
not ever truly realize it. That’s why it’s called a dystopia.

Raven Mack just released two books of poetry – Shakespeare
Greenheart, and Nasreddin Shifflett – the first two in a series of four
containing what he calls “freestyle sonnets”. He also recently put out a
musical project with a young producer called C.S.X.T.C.. Additionally, he is
part of me, or I am part of him, or one way or the other we occupy the same
physical space although our individual motivations are very different.
Raven Mack still believes in the meritocracy. In our lengthy private
discussions, I’ve tried to dissuade him from this naiveté, and encouraged him
to cultivate a detachment from any possible fruits to his creative endeavors,
not really so much as a jaded perspective but for his own self-preservation.
Because that’s not how the world works, at least not that simply. One of the
trademarks of human nature – one that seems different than the rest of nature –
is to overly complicate things, and to underestimate the strength of simple but
complex.

Anyways, with the arrival of these two new books of sonnets,
I sat down with Raven Mack to interview him about Shakespeare Greenheart and
Nasreddin Shifflett, as well as his other creative works, mostly as a partially
patronizing act, but also because I feel sorry for him, for still believing in
things that aren’t real.

- The Dirt-God

Dirt-God: So Shakespeare Greenheart and Nasreddin Shifflett
are the first two books in this freestyle sonnet series. What’s the series all
about, and what are “freestyle sonnets”?

Raven Mack: I started writing sonnets a couple years back on
the spot, like sit down and whip one out without thinking too hard about it,
much like freestyle rapping in the sense you were minimizing conscious mind
that planned shit out and letting sub-conscious or unconscious or combination
of both or all three or whatever the fuck it is that decides to speak in the
immediate moment speak first and final. I got to where I was doing them in ten
minutes, asking people for subjects, just whipping them out. So I started
thinking about doing crowns of sonnets, which is where last line of one becomes
first line of the next, and you can just run with that, or actually have the
last line of last sonnet be the same as the first line of the first sonnet, to
create a circle. Old school dudes used to do coronas of sonnets, which would be
a hundred just like that. But you could also do a heroic crown which was when
you’d have fourteen sonnets connect in that circle, but also the last line of
each of the fourteen sonnets composed a fifteenth heroic crown sonnet. Being
I’m ruled by math dork nonsense inside my own head, like counting steps,
repeating numerical patterns, total secret to-my-self O.C.D. shit like that, it
felt like a good idea to do thiat, and make it a project, to force
over-indulging, which also tends to be a thing that rules me. At first I was
gonna do 69 heroic crowns, because 69 is kinda my lucky number, but as I
started doing them, for whatever reason, it made more sense to do 76, so that
they made four quarters of 19.
DG: So how do you write them? Where do you write them? What has been your
process for conducting this project?
RM: Well, I tend to have multiple heroic crowns going on at once,
compartmentalizing them by notebook or computer device. Like I always have an
ongoing one on my work desktop, and a couple different handwritten notebooks as
well. I had a notebook a friend gave me with a raven in the boots on the cover
which I only used in the gardens on both sides of the lawn at UVA during my
lunch break, and I’d shoot for two or three per lunch break, but if I did one
and that felt like it, I’d stop. I filled that notebook up, and most of the
ones in there are in these two collections. I have a notebook that’s only for
being in the woods at home, a tiny composition books like one of those mini-ones
that I can only write in all caps in, all types of dumb rules I make so that I
can have four or five different ones going on at once. Currently, the most work
I’m doing is in a composition book where I’m working from both ends on separate
heroic crowns, and I’ve been shooting for three for that every day at lunch, in
about thirty minutes, plus writing one to three more on my desktop at work in
free moments stolen back from workday, plus assorted other ones here or there,
probably averaging about three a day. Also a friend has been filming one of the
current ones, so I wait to write the sonnet while we’re filming, one a week,
until we make a crown there. We’re four weeks into that one. They take anywhere
from ten to twenty minutes each, the more I’m dialed in and doing it regularly
throughout the day, the quicker they go.

RM: Haha, yeah, totally. I think that’s the hard part too,
now that I’ve actually finished producing two books of them, is that it’s hard
for people to really understand what’s going on with them. The reason they came
out two at a time is because I actually had submitted the first book – the
Shakespeare Greenheart one – to Copper Canyon Press in their open submission
period, and it sat for a long ass time. Like I expected immediate rejection, in
that first month like they say they let most everybody know, but it never came.
Then it went two, three, four months, and I started to think, “Oh shit, they
might actually publish my crazy shit.” But they didn’t. I was already pretty
much done with the second quarter of the project though so I figured I might as
well put them out as a pair.

DG: Why did you submit them in the first place? Copper
Canyon’s one of the premier poetry presses there is, poet laureate material.
You don’t seem to be even trying to get individual poems published in journals
and the like, which is normal way to do such things. Why did you think there’d
be success in the jump to actually having a book with no other published works?

RM: I figured all they could do is say no, and ultimately
that’s all they did. I don’t really subscribe to the whole
sending-poems-off-to-literary-journals method, which sounds egotistic as fuck,
like I’m too good for that, but it’s not really that. I applied a few years
back to the MFA program at UVA, both fiction and poetry, but didn’t get into
either. I was told I almost got into the fiction program, like I was one of the
last eliminations, but a certain faculty member there felt like I might do
better through a more creative back door entry into the program, or I might
audit a class or two and realize MFA route was not for me at all. He was right.
That shit would’ve crushed me. That traditional route, which we’re still encouraged
to respect as the way a writer gains success, has very particular tricks to
that trade that you learn. There’s a certain amount of self-perpetuation that
goes on, and you learn to take part in that. You become hazed into the elite
fraternal organization of American poetry basically. I’m not really into that.
And honestly, I feel like a dick submitting a poem for publication to anything
that I wouldn’t read myself. And I wouldn’t read most of those literary
journals that would be the ones I’d have to submit myself to.

DG: You realize all of that does sound exactly like you
think you’re too good for it, right?

RM: Yeah, I guess. But I don’t feel too good for it, I just
feel different than it. A lot of respected poetry and fiction and respected
writers, they all feel the same to me. It feels like a thousand variations on
the same shit. I’d rather not be that, which of course means, I’m outside of
that, and it is exactly being that that encourages success in terms of being
accepted as what a poet or writer means to everybody else. You either play the
game as it is demanded you play it, or you’re not gonna win. It’s that simple.

DG: So you self-publish?
RM: Yeah. Self-publish books, self-publish zines, which is a culture I grew up
with, just printing it yourself. Nobody writing about what you care about? Fuck
it, write it yourself. But even with zines there was this sort of Zine
Illuminati of zine figureheads that all got book deals and everybody knew and
had their zines in national bookstores and shit like that somehow. I never
understand how that happens. Same with self-publishing these books, I don’t
understand how to make people know it exists.

DG: You mean “marketing” the books?

RM: Well yeah, I guess, but not really. I just want people
to know they’re there, and exist. I feel like what I’m doing has validity, and
deserves to be seen, but you know how you have people who say publishing has
“gatekeepers” who decide who gets in and out? Even beyond that, it feels like
there’s this giant wall that is an enclave of all that is accepted and
respected, and I can’t even see over that wall. There’s this endless drone of
noise going on, worse so now with the internet’s constant hum into our lives,
and I’m yelling over the wall to get people inside that enclave to notice what
I’m doing.

DG: But they don’t.

RM: No, they don’t. And even then, I realize what I’m doing
is not really a part of being inside that enclave, like the shit I’m writing is
for the misfits and malcontents and wretched of the earth, not those inside the
in-crowd. But even among the misfits and malcontents, they tend to look inside
those walls for what they get into, because goddamn the noise is so fucking
loud from in there, it’s hard not to look at it for everything.

DG: How do you get around that?
RM: I got no clue. I’m talking to myself, literally talking to myself, every
fucking day trying to figure it out. And you see self-publishers do these corny
ass “why I became a writer” things or hyping up projects that don’t seem all
that hype. Or you get these internet celeb writers who start to have sort of an
internet clever cult, where they say all these WACKY things that are so CLEVER
because they’re not really being weird, they’re just pretending to be weird, so
by pretending to be weird but still being functional human beings, they can be
successful and not actually threaten anyone’s safety. And I just don’t get it.
The shit is actually really confusing to me. So I don’t know how to get around
it.

DG: In our previous conversations, I’ve mentioned to you
many times about just doing the work, not worrying about what comes of it,
accumulate the pieces and keep piling them up like rocks. Nobody may ever
acknowledge the pile of rocks you’ve built up, and some folks may see it and
really love that pile of rocks, but the majority will probably never wander
across that pile of rocks you built up in the middle of nowhere, outside of I
guess that wall you’re envisioning. Has that affected you at all? Has it
changed the way you work at these projects?
RM: Well, it hasn’t changed how I work at the projects because I’m mostly
always answering to myself then anyways. I guess it’s started to make it easier
for me to let go once I’m done, and have a finished project to share with the
random ass anonymous public that exists as this mythological entity with all
sorts of discretionary income to spend, so that once I finish these two books
and they are physically available for people, or I finish this music project I
did with this guy Finn, I can shout into the droning void of social media,
“HEY, I DID THIS NEW THING!” for a couple days, and then let it go. But it
still bothers me. I mean if you’re doing these things, and you think it’s
amazing, you want people to check it out.

DG: You ever think about the fact maybe it’s not that
amazing?
RM: Yeah. I mean you see people who do shit themselves, and it’s horrible. I
could name a few, but then again a few could probably name me, too. Look, when
I say what I’m doing is amazing, that doesn’t mean I think I’m some sort of
genius or some shit like that. Honestly, I feel like anybody could do what I
do. In the basic pit of human potential everybody has, everybody is born with,
anybody could do these things. But nobody else is, that I know of. And the
things that are considered great by our cultural tastemakers, even the offbeat
internet ones, don’t always seem that great usually.

I was lucky enough to be involved with a program called Open
Minds in the Richmond City Jail, through a friend Liz Canfield, and met the guy
who ran the jail school John Dooley. I sat in on a handful of classes of these
people who were in the jail program, writing, filling composition books, not
because of what they were supposed to, but because they had to, and it made
them better people. That experience changed my perspective, for the better.
Being part of that ultimately was my MFA program, to where now I’m trying to
get through the bureaucratic hurdles to facilitate a similar writing program
local to myself. It hasn’t happened yet, and fuck, after almost a year of
emailing motherfuckers about it every month, I don’t know that it ever will.
But I’d like it to. That writing from people society deemed unfit for freedom,
was realer than any of the shit I heard in other classes. It was realer than
any of the soft-spoken tired but acceptable metaphorical spiel I heard at
poetry readings.

So what makes one person a successful MFA candidate, and
another person somebody scribbling raps into a composition book in jail? Luck.
Chance. Where you were born basically, and the connections both to other people
as well as environment that your birth gives you. It shook the meritocracy
notion for me.

DG: And yet, here we are, me interviewing you, which is
essentially talking to yourself, to attempt to circumvent around to the inside
of that wall, to that meritocracy still. Why?

RM: Haha, I have no fuckin’ clue. I love what I do. I love
the poetry, I love the stories and essays I put in my Rojonekku Word Fighting
Arts zines, I love the music I’m doing now, which I hadn’t done in a couple
years, but I’ve got two or three different music projects going now too. It all
doesn’t really feel like choice. I’d be a very unhappy, depressed, and likely
suicidal person if I wasn’t doing it all.

DG: Shouldn’t that be enough? Why the fuck does it matter if
strangers know it exists?

RM: Yeah. I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t read literary
journals or shit like that. I mostly read old poets, used to always be hermit
Chinese poets but the past couple years I’ve been studying the old Islamic mystic
poets and philosophers a lot more. They tended to be that way too, to where
they were doing all sorts of shit constantly, but there seemed to be an
appreciation that was available to them, although I guess that’s filtered
through the perspective of time. They might not have had that during their
lifetime.

DG: So what’s next? You’ve released these two books, what do
you do now?

RM: I’m just about done with the third set, just finished my
50th heroic crown last week actually. Once I get to 57, that’ll be the third
book, then 76 to finish the whole project. I’m contemplating another
sonnet-specific project after that, then shutting down from sonnets probably.
I’m hoping to do some readings for these two books various places, try to sell
books out the back of my truck like old school rappers selling mixtapes.

DG: At independent bookstores?
RM: Hahaha, no, not even. Independent bookstores are still very much inside
those walls I was talking about earlier. I’m on the outside, so I figured might
as well embrace that. I’m talking about doing readings by the river, selling
books on the spot, catching a Greyhound to Pittsburgh or Cleveland or east
Tennessee or really wherever somebody might give me a couch to sleep on that
night before catching a bus home the next morning, to just read my shit out in
the open, for whoever’s apt to come to those things, or fuck it, just for the
trees if that’s all that’s there. People tend to suck anyways. Whenever the
tree-to-person ratio gets below like a 5.0, it starts to get frustrating. But
trees don’t buy books, and in fact my books are printed on tree flesh, which is
really fucked up now that I think about it. I guess that goes back to our human
nature complicating things.

DG: Well, good luck Raven Mack.

RM: Thank you, Dirt-god.

Raven Mack can be reached through this site you are already looking at. If you'd like Raven Mack to come talk shit somewhere convenient to you, hit him up. Meaning me.

I like to waste time scouring the digital camps of
bands and clouds of sounds, looking for African producers of today music.
Cultural anthropologist know-it-all justice bridgers love to point out how the
drum is part and parcel of the African experience, which I’m not convinced “drum”
is basic to all of humanity though certainly more prevalent in some cultures
than others, but fuck man, all people historically have had elements of their
culture who like to bang on shit rhythmically. Nonetheless, post-digital
influence on music making, where live bands are replaced by dudes with laptops,
it is interesting to go seeking out post-digital music (beat) makers from the
African continent, where live drumming is still a larger part of actual real
life. (To clarify, I’m not dissing modern beatmakers or being like “LIVE DRUMS
BETTER THAN STUPID COMPUTER PEOPLE!”)

Drums make backbone rhythm of most music now,
regardless of whether that came from Africa or not, that’s fact. (You could add
bass to that as well, but let’s stick with drums for the sake of this word
meander, okay?) You could consider drums laying the path that a piece of music
follows, where the drums guide the music as well as the listener as to the
direction to follow. Thus, the move to digital production of music, where
samples are used or machine-generated drumbeats are done at an incremental
piece of time then looped so as to repeat the pattern takes the path and
eliminates some of the meander that live drums have. Basically, it is the
difference between a traditional footpath which became a trade route, which
might pass around this mountain but then curve back organically to this river
confluence, and a railroad town built all at once, strict squares in place,
streets all straight as they can be, ground leveled to allow for this. That’s
the difference between live drumming and digital drumbeats. Again, not dissing
the new, because even in a gridlocked little town built by the company’s devious
master engineers, you can vandalize the fuck out of everything to make it
beautiful. You can still meander off the straight path.

But the beauty of the meandering path is that you
can meander off that too, and then you are meandering off a meander. (That
feels like some shit Pooh bear would say, not cartoon Pooh bear but old ass
book Pooh bear. Again, not dissing the new Pooh bear – each epoch needs its
versions of shit, especially in a capital system where you’ve got to squeeze
more fucking profits out the poor Pooh bear’s throat.) Thus I find myself
wandering the gridlocked squares of the internet, trying to find “producers”
from Africa, who combine the new-fangled looped path, but with the meandering
philosophy deeply ingrained in who they are as well, as it is still part of
their life (I am assuming… let’s not even start opening up that Pandora’s
planet rocks). Thus you have the straight path complemented by meandering path,
still letting the drums speak, not just forcing them to repetitively say the
same shit until it’s beaten into your head, as if your head was a drum instead
of the drum beaming into your head.

Actually, that thought kinda fucks me up, that we
are now the drum, being beaten into a rhythm to hold, by unseen hands. So with
that existential crisis, I guess I’ll leave you for the moment.

Thursday, August 20

Perhaps it’s because I was born a poor Southside
Virginia boy with a sandpaper soul, but I never understood the allure of silk
sheets, or silk pajamas (although Claire Huxtable sort of did them right in my
mind for a while), or silk boxers. I understand silk boxers the least of them
all, because why conceal natural nastiness within ornate finery? And that ends
up being where I stand on silk sheets as well, because generally life is a
nasty and somewhat ugly endeavor in which one tends to get stankified. It is
impossible to be clean when slipping into bed, thus the silk is useless. In
addition, hopefully there will be some nastiness in the bed as well, which also
negates any premium qualities of silk sheets. And I would prefer to encourage
nastiness in my life than stifle it for whatever benefit silk offers in sheet
form.

As for being clean when you go to bed, that is
often in my mind the defining distinguishing characteristic between shitty
physical work and lazy (yet also shitty) non-physical work – when do you
shower. If you shower in the morning before work, you are most likely cubicle
livestock. If you shower after work, it is because you are nasty from work, and
probably not comfortable polluting your home environment with the toxins of
construction, so you shower immediately after work. Of course all this assumes
one showers every day they work, which is kind of a privileged assumption in
itself. But fuck, I’m writing words in a secret works file while sitting at a
desk, because I think anybody gives a fuck what my stupid mind thinks through
language. Privileged assumption is sort of my forte. And yet, I still don’t
like silk sheets.

starting points

What It Do

Low art formed in low places by a real dude. Bread words on the bedazzling bedeviled internet machines. For flesh and blood contact, or exchanges of treasure or tribute): RAVEN MACK PO BOX 585 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 22902. For 1s and 0s robot contact (or exchanges of virus and vinegraic piss): ravenmack at gmail dot com. Paypal support can be thrown at that email address too if you got it like that.

Might I suggest the best way to enjoy my madness is to scroll to the bottom and get lost in the tag labyrinth.